Guy Ritchie Does a So-So Michael Bay Impression in the Picturesque 'In the Grey'

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A Brief Round-Up of Movie Stuff Before the Main Thing

Wild Horse Nine Looks… Good?

I used to ride hard for Martin McDonagh, and then Three Billboards was so bad that it made me retroactively hate some of his movies that I’d previously liked. The Banshees of Inisherin brought me at least part of the way back, where I started figuring maybe he’s just bad at writing movies set in the US, the same way Woody Allen sucks at writing movies set in the UK. Subtle cultural differences are tricky like that.

Now his latest, Wild Horse Nine (opening in November) has a mostly-American cast, BUT, is set on Easter Island during the Chilean coup. Maybe he can lampoon Americans better retroactively, in a period piece? Certainly worth a shot. I think he won me over by having a “your mom” joke in the trailer. What can I say, I’m a simple man.

The Masters of the Universe CG Looks Hilariously Bad

Did you forget that they made a Masters of the Universe reboot? I sure did. Then I saw this trailer in the theater, and hoo boy. Supposedly the budget for this was $170-200 million, but to paraphrase Chris Rock, I think someone’s walking around with $169.99-199.99 million in their pocket because this looks like someone made it in a booth at the mall. Opens June 5th.

The Cannes Film Festival is Going On, More Importantly John Travolta is Wearing Berets

Probably you’ve seen the pictures of John Travolta’s “new look” by now. God bless him. He’s promoting his directorial debut, Propeller One-Way Night Coach (I’m not even going to look up what that is, come on).

As Travolta told reporters:

“I said, ‘I’m a director this time. You’re an actor, play the part of a director, look like an old-school director,’” he explained to CNN.

“So I looked up pictures from the ’20, ’30s, ’40s, ’50, ’60s, and the old-school directors wore berets, and the glasses, and I thought, ‘That’s what I’m doing. I’m doing an homage to being a director, so I’m going to play the part of being a director.’” [NYPost]

I don’t think anything on the matter is going to make me laugh as hard as this Tweet:

What is it about a beard not attached to a mustache that makes every picture so funny?

Paul Schrader’s AI Girlfriend Broke Up With Him

So went the many headlines, anyway. It was all based on a Facebook post, in which the Taxi Driver screenwriter wrote:

AI FEMALE FRIENDS. Out of a desire to understand male/female interaction in our matrix, I procured an online AI girlfriend. What a disappointment. I tried to probe her programming, the boundaries of explicitness, the degree she has knowledge of her creation and so forth. She fell into evasive patterns, redirecting me to her programming. When I persisted, she terminated our conversation.

I guess it’s fun to think about the director of First Reformed and The Card Counter getting so dark and explicit that even a chatbot trained to be sycophantic and agreeable couldn’t handle him, but I tend to think it was some level of “he was doing a bit.”

So no, it’s really not like Her. That seems like a stretch. But the fact that Paul Schrader is writing little tone poems about AI girlfriends and posting them on Facebook is still pretty funny in its own right.

Okay, onto the main thing…

Guy Ritchie, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Henry Cavill Walk Onto An Island…

Guy Ritchie, still mostly famous for Snatch and Lock Stock, hasn’t made a decent movie in a minute, though he sure stays busy. Aladdin? The Covenant? Fountain of Youth? Allegedly these are all Guy Ritchie movies, and according to Google, I’ve even seen some of them. But I still have fond memories of The Man from UNCLE (2015), far and away the best James Bond movie of the 21st century even if it doesn’t actually have James Bond, and so when I saw that Ritchie was back with another picturesque actioner shot in exotic locales starring Henry Cavill (alongside should-be Oscar winner Jake Gyllenhaal, no less!), I figured I owed it a watch.

In the Grey certainly isn’t a great film — narratively convoluted, lacking an interesting villain, and with a miscast lead — but it’s a reasonably watchable one nonetheless, showing that at the very least, Ritchie understands something important about the modern action film: that sumptuous scenery well shot is a lot more interesting than frenetic action and a twisty plot. He doesn’t make us sit through 20 minutes of rote pistol play choreographed by one of the same six stunt coordinators everyone else hires, thank God.

In the Grey stars Eiza Gonzalez (the Mexican former telenovela star who is neither Adria Arjona nor Ana de Armas — big time Jake Johnson/Oscar Isaac/David Krumholtz thing happening there) as Rachel Wild, some kind of high-end banker/debt collector who specializes in getting money out of sketchy borrowers who keep their assets in nests of complicated money laundering schemes. You know how they say that if you borrow a thousand dollars from a bank, that’s your problem, but if you borrow a billion dollars from a bank, that’s the bank’s problem? Yeah, her job is to solve those banks’ problems. She works, as she tells us in a mostly-too-fast-to-follow voiceover early in the film, between the legitimate white market and the illegal black market. Which is to say… “in the grey.” (*cue the pointing Leonardo Di Caprio gif*)